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Robert Spencer in PJ Lifestyle: The Hypocrisy of the Huffington Post’s Praise of Muhammad

Over at PJ Lifestyle I explore the latest manifestation of the American’s Left’s infatuation with Muhammad:

The Huffington Post has published yet another article extolling the virtues of the orthodox Christian view of Jesus Christ – no, of course I am not serious. The Huffington Post would never publish something as right wing and sectarian as that. No, what the HuffPo has published is another in a long string of articles in praise of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, who is a much more palatable figure to the American Left.

The latest, “What Studying Muhammad Taught Me About Islam,” published in the HuffPo last week, is as risible as Karen Armstrong’s likening Muhammad to Gandhi, and is as gracefully written as a seventh grader’s book report. But for the Huffington Post, accuracy and quality are of no import: if it downplays the grim reality of Islamic jihad terror, then it’s good enough for them.

“In this short essay,” says Considine in his irredeemably clunky prose, “I want to share with you what I have learned about Muhammad and how his legacy informs my understanding of Islam. Muhammad’s beliefs on how to treat religious minorities make him a universal champion of human rights, particularly as it pertains to freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, and the right for minorities to have protection during times of strife.”

That is fanciful enough, but Considine plows on:

“Muhammad initiated many legal covenants with Christians and Jews after establishing his Muslim community. For example, in one covenant with the Christian monks at Mount Sinai, Egypt, Muhammad called on Muslims to respect Christian judges and churches, and for no Muslim to fight against his Christian brother or sister. Through this agreement, Muhammad made it clear that Islam, as a political and philosophical way of life, respected and protected Christians.”

The document to which Considine is referring, the Achtiname, is of even more doubtful authenticity than everything else about Muhammad’s life. Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632; the Muslims conquered Egypt between 639 and 641. The document says of the Christians, “No one shall bear arms against them.” So were the conquerors transgressing against Muhammad’s command for, as Considine puts it, “no Muslim to fight against his Christian brother or sister”? Did Muhammad draw up this document because he foresaw the Muslim invasion of Egypt? There is no mention of this document in any remotely contemporary Islamic sources; among other anomalies, it bears a drawing of a mosque with a minaret, although minarets weren’t put on mosques until long after the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived, which is why Muslim hardliners consider them unacceptable innovation (bid’a).

The document exempts the monks of St. Catherine’s monastery from paying the jizya. While it is conceivable that Muhammad, believing he bore the authority of Allah, would exempt them from an obligation specified by Allah himself in the Qur’an (9:29), the Achtiname specifies that Christians of Egypt are to pay a jizya only of twelve drachmas.

Yet according to the seventh-century Coptic bishop John of Nikiou, Christians in Egypt “came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month.”

The Achtiname, in short, bears all the earmarks of being an early medieval Christian forgery, perhaps developed by the monks themselves in order to protect the monastery and Egyptian Christians from the depredations of zealous Muslims.

Considine doesn’t mention any of the questions about the Achtiname’s authenticity. Instead, he just piles on more:

Similarly, in the Treaty of Maqnah, the Prophet stated Jews “may be in peace… you are in security [under Muhammad’s rule]… Towards you is no wrong and no enmity. After today you will not be subject to oppression or violence.” In the Constitution of Medina, a key document which laid out a societal vision for Muslims, Muhammad also singled out Jews, who, he wrote, “shall maintain their own religion and the Muslim theirs… The close friends of Jews are as themselves.” In safeguarding the rights of Jews, Muhammad made it clear that a citizen of an Islamic state did not have to follow Islam and that Muslims should treat Jews as they would their own friends. In developing these agreements with his fellow Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Muhammad clearly rejected elitism and racism and demanded that Muslims see their Abrahamic brothers and sisters as equals before God.

Here again, both the Treaty of Maqnah and the Constitution of Medina are of doubtful authenticity. The Constitution is first mentioned in Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad, which was written over 125 years after the accepted date for Muhammad’s death. Unfortunately for Considine, Ibn Ishaq also details what happened to three Jewish tribes of Arabia after the Constitution of Medina: Muhammad exiled the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir, massacred the Banu Qurayza after they (understandably) made a pact with his enemies during the pagan Meccans’ siege of Medina, and then massacred the exiles at the Khaybar oasis, giving Muslims even today a bloodthirsty war chant: “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” Funny how we never hear Muslims chanting, “Relax, relax, O Jews, the Constitution of Medina will return.”

Considine then goes on to claim that Muhammad “fought against racism long before the days of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.” He says, with his inimitable gift for imitating a seventh-grader’s peroration, that “Muhammad’s final sermon informed me that Islam teaches Muslims to be tolerant of difference and welcome to diversity.”

Yet all too many Arab Muslims have lorded it over non-Arab Muslims throughout Islamic history, and some do today. Why are there so many who misunderstand Muhammad’s clear words here? Perhaps because Muhammad is also said to have declared: “Allah has chosen the Arabs above others” (‘Umdat al-Salik M4.2)….

You just cannot trust the libs; they praise our enemies and despise Christianity and Western Civilization. Muhammad was a warlord, liar, womanizer, and a child molester. Muhammad certainly was not in the league with men of peace like Jesus and the Buddha.

There is NO way any rational unbiased person could EVER read the Quran or examine the life and the teachings of the Prophet of Islam and NOT come to the conclusion that he was a murderous, genocidal, slave owning thief of a Bandit.

It simply cannot be done!

Apologizing or deceiving people as to what Islam teaches IS deplorable but it is even worse when those who accept these lies don;t even do the research for themselves.

That’s what is most frustrating about the apologist crowd, either they haven’t read or researched ANYTHING and are just parroting the party line at the expense of some misplaced morality and commitment to political correctness , or they are flat out deceiving those who are gullible enough or afraid to discover for themselves the TRUTH about the founder of Islam, WHO he was , WHAT he taught, and WHY so many millions of Muslims the world over choose intolerance and violence over any other path.

“O People, just as you regard this month, this day, this city as Sacred, so regard the life and property of every Muslim as a sacred trust”

Why not say the life and property of all people’s are sacred?

“All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action”

Notice what “is” superior” to ethnicity and race, Muslim piety, which means Muslims are superior to non-Muslims regardless of race.

“Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood”

Again, I see the monster chose to use the word “Muslim” instead of “people” who constitute a brotherhood.

“Nothing shall be legitimate to a Muslim which belongs to a fellow Muslim unless it was given freely and willingly”

Here we see the monster telling his following zombies that Muslim property is off limits but non-Muslim property is open house.

The bigger and bolder the lie, the more likely it will be accepted. It would be too much time and effort for a HuffPo editor to check out the putative facts in a piece before publication. This is why fake facts can become so widely accepted as the truth even though they’re patently false, that they might as well be true. Fictive realities are born and nurtured in this way. Hell, the Mohammed-was-a-great-guy meme is now baked into even our school curricula.

Too paraphrase Neil Armstrong, Considine’s article is one small step for sheep, and a giant leap for self-destruction of civilized man.

For Cosidine to write this he ignores the terrible suffering over centuries born by non-Muslims of all faiths. Why would he do that? It is a terrible thing to do. Muhammed was not tolerant of all other religions.
Only the two Abrahamic religions that preceded Islam – Judaism and Christianity whose scriptures were recognized as lawful though corrupted – were tolerated to a limited amount. Even that level of tolerance we would consider to be more akin to discrimination and bigotry today and even back then.

As for non-Abrahamic religions:
“…Those who follow a religion which is not specified as lawful, that is to say, who do not have a recognized sacred scripture, are not to be allowed the tolerance o the Muslim state. Their choice is conversion or death, which may be commuted to enslavement. This did not present any great problem in the countries of the Middle East in the earliest areas of Islamic expansion – in the Fertile Crescent, North Africa, Sicily, Spain – because everyone was either Christian or Jewish. It presented some problems in Iran, where most people were Zoroastrians, and even more when the Muslims got to India and confronted Hindus, who were manifestly polytheist and appeared to be idol-worshippers. Eventually, legal formulas were found to accommodate all of these….” The Multiple Identities of the Middle East by Bernard Lewis

Not all four schools allowed the non-Abrahamic religions like Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Zoroastrians etc… to eventually be dhimmis like the Jews and Christians. Only one. It is not true that it was not much problem in the earliest days of expansion. Arab polytheists, African animists etc.. also suffered and many exist no more.

This guy on Huffington Post is covering up genocide that Hindus and others faced at the hands of Mohammed and his followers. The whole no-compulsion-in-religion everyone talks about Islam having only applies to those people who are allowed to be dhimmis – Jew and Christians. All the other religions which Islam does not recognize as having sacred scripture are not afforded the “tolerance,” and the no-compulsion-in-religion does not apply to non-dhimmis.

Robert Spencer in PJ Lifestyle: The Hypocrisy of the Huffington Post’s Praise of Muhammad
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“Useful idiot” indeed. Never mind that most of the texts Craig Considine cites are well-known forgeries that were concocted by oppressed Infidels hoping to ward off islamic savagery.

He cites *very few* actual Islamic texts.

Really, with all this ludicrous whitewashing about how the “Prophet” was supposedly anti-racist and for equaL rights, I’m surprised he didn’t throw in the other ludicrous revisionist tropes and claim that Muhammed was a “feminist” and an “environmentalist”, as well…

Muhammad was a sociopath who PERSONALLY decapitated 900 UNARMED JEWS of the Banu Quarayza tribe in 627. This was the first Holocaust of the JEWS. Hitler &the Nazis emulated the foundational antisemitism of Islam. Only liberals and Muslims can rationalize the sociopathic mass murderer Muhammad as someone to revere.

I think Craig Considine is lying for the same reason that the monks who created the Achtiname lied which is to protect Christians from the Muslims. If I was a persecuted Monk I might have tried to fool Muslims into believing that Muhammad commanded them to tolerate me too.

I think Craig Considine is lying for the same reason that the monks who created the Achtiname lied which is to protect Christians from the Muslims. If I was a persecuted Monk I might have tried to fool Muslims into believing that Muhammad commanded them to tolerate me too.
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Sure—I might, too. I have no criticism for the direct victims of Islam doing what they could to try to deflect Islamic savagery.

But this is *not* the position Craig Considine is in. It is far more likely from his history that this is just more of the same quishy nonsense that you find from dhimmi tools like Karen Armstrong.

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